This seminar is open to both undergraduates (LCC 4400) and graduate students (LCC 6215), with instructor's permission, focusing on games as cultural artifacts and on the elements of game design, especially electronic games. A guiding text will be Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, which examines several rhetorics of play, emphasizing the complexity of play as a biological, social, psychological, and cultural phenonomena. What function does playfulness serve in survival, mastery, creativity, adaptability? How does organized play reflect, subvert, reinforce cultural patterns? Do games provoke violence or do they divert it? Is enacting a role in a game more or less real than identifying with a character in a movie? What is the genealogy of games, from board games to electronic games? Is there a canon of games like a canon of musical or literary art? Are there "high" and "low" games? The course will include theoretical readings and close analysis of specific games. We will consider games in all media within the general context of the blossoming of electronic games as a major new art and entertainment genre over the past 30 years.

Students will give weekly reports on games and readings about games, and will present a final paper or project that is a significant work of game analysis or game design.